


vows

by casualbird



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: (in the not gross way), Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Lucina (Fire Emblem)-centric, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Time Travel, Trans Female Character, Trans Lucina (Fire Emblem), canonical character deaths but they get better
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27125560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: Be tenacious like Father, steady like Papa. Resolved, like her surrogate mother Sumia.Oh, she tried to be.In the future past, Chrom weds Frederick. On the new and brighter path, he does not.
Relationships: Chrom/Frederick (Fire Emblem), Chrom/Sumia (Fire Emblem)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18





	1. what's past is prologue

The story had been a thread in Lucina’s tapestry as soon as Papa decided she was old enough to hear it, and perhaps before. It was inborn, innate.

“Papa,” she would plead, tugging the sleeve of his doublet, “tell me, tell me again.”

He always knew which tale she was asking for--not one of the minstrel’s lais, not a bardic song of chivalry, no matter how she glimmered for them.

“Once again?” he would say, setting his paperwork to rest, turning to heft her up into his lap. “Very well, Lucina,” and she’d swear she could see a blush burgeon over his whiskers, “I’ll tell you about your father--a-and myself.”

* * *

It always began with the splendor of that night in Ylisstol: their last before the Shepherds would ride again, and spirits were mead-soaked and joyful. Seasonable, for the advent of summer, and the crickets played lively and loud as Chrom and Frederick strolled idle through the palace grounds.

The assassin made the jump from nowhere to Chrom’s blind spot in the space between two notes of cricketsong. The serrated blade--the thrust in and the infinitely longer draw out, the shock that rendered Frederick as good as _not there._ And then, the time it took to remember what it meant to lunge, to tear the attacker off and shove him to the ground and plunge a spearhead through his neck.

Frederick lofted his prince upon his back, making for a healer at a full-tilt clangoring run, blood seeping through the collar of his coat.

By the time he laid him down again, left him in Lissa’s tremoring hands, Ylisstol was burning.

Ylisstol was burning, and Chrom was not his prince anymore.

Chrom, exalted in the space of a choked last breath.

Emmeryn’s funeral bells wailed from the tower of every chapel in the nation for weeks, and Chrom in his wound-bed could scarcely take the sound.

Frederick sat with him, though it made next to nothing better.

Lucina knew little of the words they spoke with tight-clasped hands, Frederick kneeling over the bedstead. Just the one line, and how resolute her Papa looked when he’d repeat it.

“Frederick,” he would say, with the certain gravity of a man quoting verbatim, “don’t leave my right hand.”

He hadn’t, and when Chrom rose solemn from his bed, Frederick shouldered him. Carried him, even, in the early days--Lucina knew the tale of her father’s coronation day, when he was borne up to the throne in the steady arms of his sworn vassal.

When he had learned to walk again, Frederick carved a cane for him from a dark heartwood, entreated him gently despite all protests to use it.

This part always struck little Lucina’s chords, always made her marvel. Her father’s cane, irreplaceable despite being old and scuffed, was at his side as inexorably as his sword, his husband.

It was as stalwart a companion as his destrier, who Frederick had taught him to sit, to lead charges from. As dependable as his new great knight’s armor, made in the very image of Frederick’s.

Within the space of two years, heart and signet ring in hand, Chrom begged it of him once again. _Please_ please, _don’t leave my right hand._

Frederick never did.

* * *

The rest were stories for other nights. Their wedding day, the cheering of every bell in Ylisstol, the sweeping vows and lavish feast. The war that brought Gangrel to heel, and the great rejoicing after. Lucina’s own birth, with Aunt Sumia her surrogate mother, giving her breath for love of her country, her king and prince-regnant, her _friends._

Lucina drank them as if she wanted to quaff the sea. She studied the songs of them, the portraits in the great hall, the tales her father and Papa told her.

They made her strong.

She prayed for that strength, when her father was lost. When Papa was lost, and the kingdom, and all she’d ever battled, ever held herself together for. When she stepped through the rift in the world itself, falling backwards into a world she’d no guarantee could be saved.

Be tenacious like Father, steady like Papa. Resolved, like Aunt Sumia.

Oh, she tried to be.

Still, the twilit hour she made for Ylisstol, she prayed.

* * *

The assassin appeared, true to Papa’s stark description.

Lucina cut him down before her fathers could gasp, could grasp their shock.

Exalt Emmeryn lived, at the very least for a time. The war, eventually, was won.

So what in Lucina’s shrouded-savior heart could possibly have been so uneasy?

* * *

Lucina held the Exalt’s door in the palace that night, cutting down foes with the grace and ferocity of her fathers in their prime.

Still, it did not escape her notice that Frederick choked a different point, that Chrom burned that night away hale and hearty, fighting fiercely at Sumia’s side.

* * *

Watching from the crowd, she wondered if Father’s wedding to Sumia was anything like the one where he’d wed Papa. The white-sapphire-gold, the throngs of watchers, the bright gleeful heraldry.

The vows, speaking of a love that was soaring and immovable at once, that would carry Ylisse into the new age Lucina hoped was coming. After a time, she could no longer stand to listen to her Father’s words of alien joy. Her gaze gravitated instead to Frederick--to her _Papa,_ standing to the side, a grave-faced groomsman.

She stood far from him, below and afield and heavily cloaked, but she could still make out his expression.

It was familiar, that gleaming-marble stoicism, the stonecut stiffness of his upper lip. The dark, soft veins that shot it through. Uncanny, perhaps, on a face twenty years younger, but--

This was the face that her Papa had borne in the last weeks of his life, between the day he’d laid his husband down and the night he fell himself.

She felt it in the set of her own jaw, that day, no matter how she’d striven for Father’s happiness, no matter her love for Aunt Sumia.

* * *

Ylisse was quiet, for a time. Lucina’s work kept her rapid-running, but still.

She watched. She listened.

Within a year, she stood under that balcony again, draped in that same cloak. With the distance, she could scarcely see herself, bundled in white muslin to Sumia’s chest.

Still, it was strange. The Exalt’s firstborn, the crown princess, _Lucina._

This time, the world knew from her first breath that the child was a girl. Lucina had had to guess at it herself, reckon with it before she’d ever learned to read.

She thought of it, as she stood among the myriad. Thought of the day she’d sworn it to her fathers, high-pitched and still stumbling on her consonants. Of the day she was their little princess, the day they gave her that same name.

She thought of the way they’d held her, folded close in sturdy arms, stroking her hair and murmuring _yes, yes, of_ course _you are our daughter._

Lucina wobbled, and wished, not for the first or even the thousandth time, that she could be there once again.

* * *

She carried on--always quiet, solemn and swift under her cloak. Always behind some curtain, fighting not to be her fathers’ bold daughter, not to burst and reveal all.

Someday, she knew, she would have to do it anyway.

* * *

The war returned, more than a decade early. The time came shortly after that, gnashing at her heels.

Lucina stood, knees shaking, on the bridge before her father in that harsh-cold dawn.

“Father,” she murmured, through a too-tight throat.

Chrom spluttered. She was glad of the interruption--it gave her the solace-space to breathe.

She sighed, smoothing Papa’s stern veneer over her face, fighting back the ache of tears.

“I have much to explain to you.”


	2. once and future king

Lucina’s eyes would not abandon the clutch of Father and Aunt Sumia’s hands, the way that Papa wrung his own.

He stood a step back from them, sentinel, and it was nothing but wrong that he could not stand at Father’s side, could not be the steady strength he’d always been.

She tried, more than once, to speak. Each time, her voice would crumble like eggshell, dying behind the wedding ring that hung around her neck.

* * *

Lucina forced upon herself that regal face, stern and stable and stone, but it was the waver behind it that truly made it hers. The expression of the girl-queen she’d been, of a child whose hand wailed for the hold of her fathers’.

“I understand,” she said, her words coming out in shards, “that my tale beggars belief.”

“Still. Please.”

“Pray,” she said, without a whimper, “hear me out.”

Chrom fixed her with a nod, eyes narrowed as if unshuttering his mind. It was the most familiar of actions, but Lucina still shuddered, to see it on a face so young.

But it mattered not. Chrom was her father, and Sumia her mother, and Frederick her beloved Papa.

Surely--she had to believe she could lean on them. There was no other choice. She could think of nothing worse than telling them, than prising the soul of the Shepherds apart--nothing worse, that was, than lying any longer.

She marshaled her strength, cleared her clenching throat, and spoke.

“I come to you by the grace of the Goddess, from a time nearly twenty years hence.”

The words--she had never intended to speak them, but they fell out with something like finesse, with practice anyway. She would imagine this in innrooms, curled under threadbare covers--would imagine hands ruffling her hair, chucking her beneath her chin, would yearn to be called _daughter_ again.

This morning, though, this sick liminal hour was cold.

“The war born here tonight begets years upon years of attrition, and ends calamitously.”

Lucina quivers to think of it--of the throngs of monsters, the stacks of plain pine coffins in her palace halls.

“I have traveled from that future past to curtail its tragedy--to save my kingdom from destruction.”

Deep breath.

“My kingdom, as well as my--my family, who all--perished, in the war.”

“I am Lucina, and you, Chrom, are my father. Lady Sumia… you are my mother. But...”

It gave her naught but pause, the thunderstruck stun on their faces, on _her_ face. And the perplexment on Frederick’s--it panged her, deep like the ring of a carillon, to bring to light what she herself did not know what to make of.

Lucina scraped deep into herself for some semblance of Papa’s composure, coming up only with dregs.

Still--she stood stalwart, and did not cry when she said “In the future past, however, it was--different.”

The murmuring around her may well have all been silence, for all she heard of it. She sighed.

“In the world I hail from, Lady Sumia was my mother still. But--only as a surrogate. Chrom, Father, you were--you had married...”

The word _Papa_ froze over her tongue.

“...Frederick,” she managed, all in a stagger.

By the time anyone had collected themself enough to beg an explanation, she was gone. The wedding ring was all she left, ripped from her own neck, glistening in Chrom’s outstretched, searching hand. Evidence, insult and injury, an invitation to truth and turmoil.

It bore the gems and patterns of Sumia’s, but had been sized for Frederick’s hand. Incontrovertible.

This was the very purpose she’d brought it for, the reason that she wore it all these years. Still, she felt unmoored, too light, without it.

Surely--surely everything now was lost.

* * *

Lucina tacked her horse with all speed, though her hands quaked on the straps of the saddle, the tangling bridle and cold bit. She would go, she must, it was deeper than duty at this point.

Duty. Faithfulness. A commitment to _whole truth._

Her fathers, her Aunt Sumia had steeped her with these things since she could scarcely speak. Lying to them--even by omission, even though they were younger than the ones she had loved, even though they were younger than _her…_ Even though they hadn’t been ready, she--

It was Papa’s influence, that made her this way, and up until this moment she’d been proud of her forthrightness.

“Catria,” she murmured, pressing her palm to the wide plane of her horse’s neck. “What shall we do now?”

“Well,” came a voice, raspy with exertion. “For starters, you should stay here.”

She couldn’t keep it back again--she whirled, whispered _father…!_

Father smiled the same way he always had--the way that, by Lucina’s time, had etched itself in the lines upon his face. As optimistic, as bright as midsummer sun.

“I won’t pretend to understand what’s going on,” he said, “but based on what you said… Lucina, I think we’re gonna need you.”

 _We need you._ Wasn’t that what she’d always wanted him to say? When she dreamed of the day he would let her, seventeen and bursting, join the fight.

Wasn’t that what Lissa had told her he had said, with the last of his torn breaths?

The bridle went slack in her hands.

“You look like me,” said Chrom, clumsily. He reached for her, and she--she let him, feeling that callused clammy palm against her shoulder. “You really are my girl, aren’t you? I never knew.”

“I should thank you,” he carried on, “for everything you’ve done for me. You’re a hero already, and, heh, you’re barely a year old.”

Eyes wet as the dew on the grass, Lucina smiled.

“I thank you.”

“No need,” said Chrom. “I’d do anything for my--my little girl.”

She fell into him, then, and could not stopper her tears any longer. She shook, and his hands circling on her back soothed all her shivers away.

“You must have felt like I did,” he said, “when I became the Exalt. You must have been younger than me, huh? Boy-King Chrom, they called me. It drove Frederick insane.”

He hesitated, unsure if he was supposed to have said anything. Lucina only shook her head--she knew. She’d always known. They’d long stopped calling him that by Lucina’s time, but it had still been a subject of her Papa’s stalwart bluster.

“They called me Lucina the Maid,” she told him. “Pa--Frederick hated that, too.”

A laugh, soft and vital, muffled against her hair. Chrom’s arms wound more tightly around her, and he shifted his weight just slightly, as if rocking his baby.

For a long time, they were silent. Lucina quivered, and sobbed, and thought of her coronation day. Of the ball and scepter, heavy in her hands, of the crown that fit like a vise around her skull, urging its plates to fuse.

She thought of the teatimes she’d had with her father, when he’d told her about the days of Boy-King Chrom. About how small he felt, how unequal to the task.

If she could do nothing else--if her presence was only to be a hindrance… at the very least, here was something she could fix.

Boy-King Chrom stood before her now, enfolded her. She sighed, listed backwards, reached into her pockets for a coin.

It was a tarnished silver thing, hand-struck with ragged edges. Lucina pressed it, gently, into her father’s hand.

His eyes fell on the portrait, small as a cameo pin, but still--unmistakable. His own features, sharpened with age, accented by regal beard and crown.

“Is this…?”

“Yes,” she murmured. “You were a great king.”

Chrom smiled, shook his head.

“I’ll need your help to be that way again.”

* * *

How could Lucina leave him, after that?

**Author's Note:**

> hello hello, thank you so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed--do tell me what you thought of this, and where you think things are going to go! i think this story has three or four more chapters in it, and i have Rough ideas of what they are going to be like, but to have created a full outline in advance would have been too responsible and as such i wouldn't do it in a million years. 
> 
> if you like, please come hang out with me on [twitter (18+)!](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles)


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